Tag: advice

One could not have failed to have noticed that the festive season is upon us once more, bringing with it the annual year end frenzied product push. Our team at Akoni thought it particularly relevant to highlight ways in which your business can optimise your email marketing to maximise sales from existing subscribers or prospective client bases.

Email marketing is the most powerful tool of a marketer – it is easy to measure ROI and is a tool that enables business to reach the customer directly. It is often mistakenly assumed in marketing that a measurement of deliverability is simply the proportion of emails that were ‘accepted’. If an email does not bounce back or is not rejected, it does not necessarily mean that it has been delivered.

Delivery rate is a calculation of mail sent minus the volume that bounced. However, this is quite misleading as it doesn’t take into account the emails that are simply filtered into spam files or are ignored. Overall, deliverability is making sure you are doing what you can to put yourself in the best position to be actually seen by your subscribers, says Tom Corbett of Experian.

70 per cent of mail sent globally being considered spam by Internet Service Providers (ISPs), which have developed settings which the customer can adjust to suit their unique inbox preferences. These filters massively reduce the volume coming to an inbox. However, the interpretation of spam differs according to personal preference. As a result, what is becoming increasingly important is personalisation in email communication – making your email wanted is the key to a successful email campaign.

Know Your Client

Up to date research into customer behaviour and market analysis will show you where and how you should target your audiences effectively. This will help hone your campaign and make sure it appeals to the right group. This is the most important step in any marketing campaign by far, as everything starts here.

Make Customers Feel Special

Creating a feeling of belonging to an exclusive club or a select group is an extremely effective marketing tool. People are naturally competitive, and want to be made to feel special, the chosen ones – more superior. By making sure that your clients are given VIP passes, or exclusive prices or a top-class service reserved for a few, you are immediately tapping into a very powerful psychological tool by stroking their ego’s, catching their attention and creating a bond.

A Clear, Simple Message – Repeated

Know what your company does, what they stand for and why the customer needs your product. Get your branding right. Keeping to the basic core with simple, direct messages.Repeating the lines that are part of your branding core, that won’t change and are easily associated with your brand will create a sense of familiarity and a sense of trust for your customers. They will think of your brand when they hear similar words, or catch phrases. Own your taglines.

Always focus on the customer. Personalised campaigns are becoming more and more essential.

Well Presented

Employ a designer or use the templates provided in tools available. Design is essential as we are all far more likely to read visuals than words. Make sure that you tap into this, as getting simple elements like the colour tone wrong can have expensive consequences. Watch spelling and grammar.

Regular Emails

Keeping in touch with customers on a regular basis is important. It reinforces the notion that your company is reliable and trustworthy. Keep postings or mail drops to the same time on the same day. Be aware that too many emails a week can lead to engagement fatigue – making your company an enemy as opposed to friend.

Strong Call to Action

It’s all very well having a clear email selling you something, but people need instructions. The Call to Action is the moment a potential target takes the bait – the conversion of effort to profit. Tell people what you want them to do, very short, sharp and clear, containing a verb – three words maximum. “BUY NOW” or “ENTER HERE”

Sense of Urgency

The sense that this offer is only available for a short period of time certainly makes it more valuable. Some emails have an actual clock feature that counts down the time till the offer expires. It puts incredible pressure on the customer, which is effective.

Choosing the Right Business Tools

There are many examples of excellent products out there which offer top class email marketing software (MailChimp, ConstantContact, Campaignmaster) through to all-in-one CRM and Sales package tools such as Hubspot, Salesforce and Pipedrive . It’s imperative to find a solution that fits your brand’s unique needs and requirements. When you are starting out, here are some key items to take note of and factor in before settling on a CRM system:

Does it offer support? What are the hours that support is offered in?

Is there training offered as part of the package? If not, how much extra will this cost?

Does it integrate easily with your current systems?

Find out how pricing scales, the longer you use it, and the more features you engage – especially regarding database size. Are there add-on features available or do you have to upgrade for more features or additional contacts? Are there hidden fees? Limits of messages sent a month? Charges to add users?

Find out if the software is designed for use by both sales and marketing. How it will better align sales and marketing teams? Ask for examples of how each team can use it. Get your marketing and sales teams to sample different tools before deciding on one.

Does the platform manage full customer life cycles, or only leads and prospects? You want to be able to engage and nurture contacts throughout the entire life cycle. After all, the best customer you can get is the one you already have.

Ensure the software offers mobile optimised landing pages and forms, as well as responsive email templates. Do you have additional mobile technology needs? It is essential that the software can meet your mobile requirements.

There is no replacement for personal engagement with clients. People want to see that they are valued and can trust your service if they engage it. That is what marketing comes down to – convincing the your client base that your product is better than the next. Try and humanise your email communication as much as possible – making your email wanted is the key to a successful mail programme.

Akoni helps businesses make the most of their cash. Follow us on Twitter @akonihub or connect with us here.

As a small business owner, you are most likely a Jack of All Trades and a Master of Most. Managing your business often implies that you multitask and cope with production crises, cashflow nightmares and so much stress that you never sleep properly. Well – this is National Work Life Week, and having been a small business owner myself, I understand why it is necessary to create a national campaign around Work/Life Balance – because SME owners are far too busy and stressed to notice it otherwise!

Here are some tried and true tips I have practiced – hopefully you’ll find them useful too. Listen Up – it’s time to take stock, #timetorebalance:

Remember why you started your company in the first place. You spend a large percentage of your life working – you go through stress and sacrificing many things for your SME to succeed. You need to remember the passion that lead you to getting it off the ground. Keep coming back to that. That is what will get you up in the morning.

Learn to delegate. You won’t believe how liberated you’ll feel when you hand that work that you hate doing and aren’t very good at anyway to someone who specializes in it! Now you can concentrate on what you are best at, and this will be much more rewarding and enjoyable. By delegating, you will lower your stress levels. Use tools and apps to cut down on one’s workload and money spent on travel and outsourcing significantly. Here is a range of some that may be useful:

Try Skype, Google Hangouts, ClickMeeting for online meeting and webinars. These can be used to conduct webinars, teleconferencing, online meetings and presentations. No more travelling out of town or even across town – saving you money and time.

Asana is a task and project management productivity tool for team collaboration and communication that eliminates the use of email. Free for up to 4 users. With Asana, you can set up projects, and tasks within projects. Add staff or clients to tasks and projects to keep everyone up to date.

Apps like Producteev and Harvest let you see how you’re spending your time, what’s on target and what requires follow-up.

Pocket – this allows you to store videos, articles or anything else you find of interest. It’s all in one place and ready to look at when you have time.

Evernote – one of the most popular apps for managing a to-do list and keeping notes. It even has an app to make it faster to read blog posts and articles by showing them in a simple format.

Learn to set boundaries. If you are open about realistic timings at the beginning of each project, explaining why you need that time to do a good job, your clients are far more likely to understand – because they need the best quality product you can deliver.Turning down work is hard, but is it worth taking on if you and the client are going to be dissatisfied with the result? Your reputation may suffer, which affects future work and client relationships.

Write things down. In this age of electronics it sounds archaic, but often the simple task of writing down ideas and thoughts or tasks that you think of suddenly will reduce your stress levels. Write a TO DO list before lights out. It clears your head, and facilitates sleep, knowing that you will have your list when you wake up. Same goes for those 2am thoughts – write it down and there is a good chance you’ll get to sleep again.

Activate your brain and body. Your body can’t take stress for extended periods without it having often serious health consequences. Find something that you enjoy doing. The brain and body benefit far more if you practice an activity you prefer instead of dreading your training sessions. Yoga, running, lifting weights, walking – just get out and do something fun. Your brain needs blood flow to function at it’s best, and different environments are stimulating.

Family is important. As a small business owner, speak to your employees about what they would suggest in terms of flexible hours and/or the option to work from home. Being flexible in one’s approach will have benefits all round: happier employees, better quality work, you’ll attract quality talent when recruiting and your clients will ultimately benefit from dealing with a motivated company. Have a look here for some more tips as an employer.

Remind yourself what success is. Ian Sanders, author of Juggle: Rethink Work, Reclaim Your Life and Mash Up says,“I recommend creating a personal dashboard where you set out the things you want in life and the reasons why you are doing them. You should write down all the things that are important to you, whether it is making money, creative stimulation, spending time with your kids or playing tennis. These are your definition of happiness and success. Then you can monitor this regularly to see how you are doing.”

In this frenetically-paced age, it is important to keep your eye on what Really matters – your health, your happiness, your family and your goals in life. Enjoy what you do, otherwise change it. A frazzled, crabby and stressed business owner is not going to be any good to anyone. You owe it to your family, your staff and clients to be the Best Version of You possible. And that means gaining perspective by getting away from work every now and then – really make an effort to unplug from all those digital devices, look up at the sky and B-R-E-A-T-H-E deeply. Your life depends on it.

Akoni helps businesses make the most of their cash. Follow us on Twitter @akonihub or connect with us here.

This is a real banking revolution: the CMA (Competitions and Markets Authority) announced some stringent rules for banks in the UK to comply with by 2018. This throws the gates wide open to competitors, and will have banks scrambling to attract customers.

As the banking industry has been slow to respond with innovations, the CMA has made it clear that it expects to utilise its own enforcement powers, in addition to expecting reform from the government to push through change. While some commentators believe the change is not far enough, I am of the view that steps in the direction of major change start slowly and momentum builds quickly.

These changes include:

– Open Banking by 2018 – by which the CMA means to accelerate mobile banking in the UK retail banking sector. SME’s and individuals will be free to share their banking data securely with other banks and third parties, enabling them to manage their accounts with a range of providers through a single App – thus having more control over their money and also being able to shop around for better deals. Banking on the move, having your bank in your phone is the way of the future.

– Accurate, unbiased information about their services and truthful information about products and quality of service – from their branches to their websites. there is much agreement that with a significant range of fintech investment both within the industry itself, as well as new players, banking as it currently stands will undergo drastic change.

– Making event- based communication compulsory – for example if a branch closes or there is an increase of charges, they have to send their customers notice of these happenings. THIS was raised to provide trigger points for review of banking products – like the insurance sector which has an annual policy renewal as a trigger to prompt considerations of cost, cover, benefits and performance of an insurerer.

The CMA has also made it clear that it is to be made easier for customers to search for banks offering more competitive rates and to enable easier account switching.

Apparently only 3% of individuals and 4% of businesses ever change their banks in a year, despite the huge savings this could provide.

A range of other measures has also been announced – for example, those of you who may have been surprised to find that you are in an unarranged overdraft, without ever having arranged one, the CMA has introduced specific measures including that the bank needs to alert you before this happens, and offer you a grace period. It was found that banks in the UK make an unbelievable £ 1.2billion a year from unarranged overdrafts.

By 2018, SME’s should be in a much better banking position after the Competition Marketing Authority’s findings

Businesses and individuals win all round with the banks having to provide accurate information on banking services and charges for small business. One of the key assessments is that small business had lacked the tools needed to assess fair credit and availability and service quality.

In order to progress further, the CMA will be supporting Nesta. This requires banks to provide financial backing and technical support for this innovation-supporting charity that aims to partner and work with organisations who need information and expertise on the practice and theory of innovation.

This initial level of game-changing recommendations will make the United Kingdom the most attractive banking hub for customers as well as provide another example of leading the way in innovation, particularly relating to small and medium businesses.

Akoni helps businesses make the most of their cash. Follow us on Twitter @akonihub or connect with us here.